Cost of Bay Delta tunnel project could be $9,000 a household

Opponents of the governor's Bay Delta Conservation Plan say the construction of 35 miles of concrete tunnels around the sensitive Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta will cost the average household in Los Angeles as much as $9,000, or add $5 to $16 a month to already increasing water bills over 40 years.

"This is an unfair project," said Adam Scow, California campaign director of Food & Water Watch, a national environmental and consumer watchdog group. "It is a way to funnel more water to special interests at the expense of ratepayers and taxpayers and the environment. "

In an effort to cut off the governor's announcement in support of the plan and its costs scheduled Wednesday for Milpitas, a town in the Silicon Valley, Scow's group, along with Restore The Delta, a grass-roots environmental group from the Delta area, held a press call Tuesday calling the $23 billion project a boondoggle. Opponents say the project amounts to corporate welfare for agribusiness, which needs cheap water, and oil interests in Kern County, which needs more water to loosen deeply buried oil reserves, a process known as fracking.

"It is simply too costly for agriculture to absorb," said Jeffrey Michael, director of the Business Forecasting Center at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. "Urban users will have to pick up a larger share of the cost than they have been told. "

Supporters, such as the farming industry in the Central Valley, Kern County water interests, the California Natural Resources Agency and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, say the project is necessary to divert flows around sensitive habitat and help restore populations of salmon and Delta smelt, endangered species.

"The Bay Delta Conservation Plan is an investment in securing water supply for two-thirds of California - about 25 million people," said Richard Stapler, spokesperson for the California Natural Resources Agency. "It will also supply water to 3 million acres of the world's most productive farmland. Hard to put a cost on that. "

Indeed. The costs of this megaproject keep changing.

Originally estimated at $4 billion, then $14 billion, but that is only the capital cost of the twin concrete tunnels. The state agency has said the cost is closer to $23 billion once other aspects are included, such as habitat restoration, operation and maintenance. Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to Southern California from the Delta and the Colorado River, had estimated the cost at $60 per year per household. But Restore the Delta says they've underestimated the urban water user's true share.

The group says the state is concealing other costs, such as the $1.2 billion yearly debt service on the massive project. The group says the project could cost as much as $61.5 billion when adding the debt service cost over 35 years of borrowing.

The opponents say the state has yet to do a cost-benefit analysis, so they did their own. They said this project will cost $2.50 for every $1 in economic benefits for a cost-benefit ratio of 0.4. As a comparison, the other pending large-scale public works project, the high-speed rail project that will run from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, has a cost-benefit ratio of 2.0, much better.

"Most projects with a cost-benefit ratio of below one would be eliminated from consideration," Michael said.

Stapler said the state is not required to do such an analysis; in fact, the federal government overseeing endangered species and habitat restoration discourages it. However, the state is working on cost-benefit studies of nine alternatives that will estimate the cost per household on an urban user in Glendale verses one in Long Beach, he said.

For example, customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power may pay more because the agency uses more imported water than say communities in Long Beach or the San Gabriel Valley, which have an ample supply of ground water or other local water sources.

The state will execute a habitat conservation plan for the wetlands around the Delta that includes the tunnels project, which would divert 9,000 cubic feet per second of fresh water around the Delta and into the State Water Project. Some of that information may be released Wednesday as part of additional chapters in the complex Delta plan, he said.

Michael said the state project is driven by corporate interests toward a large-scale fix. He proposes a $2 billion fix of the Delta's earthen levees using seismic retrofitting.

"The state has refused to consider any seismic upgrade alternatives," he told the press. "They can be completed in a few years, not decades. And they are cheaper. "

State engineers say that is not enough to withstand a large earthquake, which could interrupt the flow of state water to Southern California.

"When you armor those levees, it makes them wider and cuts into your ability to create new habitat for those species," Stapler said.

In Santa Barbara, residents approved a pipeline to the State Water Project in 1991 that was estimated to cost $270 million but ended up costing $1.76 billion when the interest was added in, said Carolee Krieger, president and executive director of California Water Impact Network. The burden to homeowners and water agencies has been steep.

She's worried about the added cost of a new water project. Santa Barbarans and those living in Santa Maria could see increases in water bills of $2,000 to $7,000 a year if the Delta plan is approved.

"My fear is our four water agencies would face dire consequences and could go bankrupt," she said. "The urban ratepayers in Southern California are being asked to subsidize agricultural interests in the Central Valley, as well as real estate speculators," she warned.

Restore The Delta says many Southern California cities are requiring conservation and therefore, plan on buying less water from the state in the future. By recycling water, cleaning up polluted ground-water basins in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, and putting more emphasis on conservation, Southern California can save 7 million to 13 million acre-feet of water without building an expensive tunnel project, said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore The Delta.